[WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On Sat, 19 May 2012 09:22:23 -0400, Horologium wrote:

> I have seen pages with endless external links, and in those, there
> seems to be an equal number of spam links at the top and the
> bottom of the list. Usually the links in the middle are the best,
> but of course, YMMV. 

That might be an interesting thing to study... the more simpleminded 
spammers (like the more simpleminded among "marketing types" in 
general) would probably be inclined to put their spam links first in 
the list; they're not into any sort of subtlety or cleverness, just 
shoving in everybody's faces the stuff they're trying to promote.  A 
slightly more devious spammer might realize that people will be 
looking for spam links at the top due to mindsets like that, so 
they'll put their links on the bottom so they won't be noticed as 
much by spam-fighters (even if they're also not noticed as much by 
normal readers).  Then, if spam-fighters notice this and start 
defeating it by looking at the bottom too, the next stage would be to 
insert the links in the middle of a long list, where it would be 
least likely to be noticed.  (Though, if the list has some sort of 
internal organization, such as alphabetical or chronological, then a 
misplaced link might still stand out to the sort of geeks who 
obsessive-compulsively maintain such lists.)


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